After yesterday’s rather special immersion in Göran’s Småland, this morning began with breakfast overlooking the water at our extraordinary Björn Ulvaeus-owned hotel in Västervik. Göran joined us before we finally said goodbye and set off on the next stage of our journey: Stockholm.
Rather than heading immediately for the main road, we took the prettier route out of Västervik, winding our way through countryside that now looked unmistakably Swedish: forests, lakes, occasional farms and red wooden houses appearing between the trees. After the wide open landscapes further south, this was becoming the Sweden we had somehow expected to find.
Our main stop of the day was Söderköping, chosen for one very important reason.
Ice cream.
Söderköping is apparently something of an ice-cream destination, largely thanks to Smultronstället, which sits beside the Göta Canal and describes itself not as an ice-cream parlour but an ice-cream restaurant. Its creations are consequently rather more ambitious than a couple of scoops in a cone.Mark chose something called a Chokladsväng. I went for the magnificently named Wacky Woo Doo. Neither was an exercise in moderation.
Fortunately, Söderköping turned out to be worth visiting even without industrial quantities of ice cream. It is a delightful little town built around the Göta Canal, and we arrived at exactly the right moment to watch a boat making its stately progress through one of the locks. Everyone stopped to watch. Nobody was actually going anywhere very quickly. Yet the slow choreography of gates, water and boat was enough to hold the whole little crowd for several minutes.
We also found a wonderful old Rikstelefon telephone kiosk on Rådhustorget. It is more historically significant than it might first appear. Sweden was one of the pioneers of mass telephony, and the state Rikstelefon network, established in the late nineteenth century, helped connect previously separate local networks and make long-distance calling possible. At a time when telephones were still a novelty across much of the world, Sweden was becoming one of the most telephone-connected countries anywhere.
The old kiosk has now been given a rather lovely second life. Instead of making calls, you can go inside and listen to recordings telling stories from Söderköping’s history. A telephone box once used to talk from the town now allows the town to talk to you.
And then there was the extraordinary freestanding wooden bell tower beside St Laurentii Church. Dark, massive and rather wonderful, it looks quite unlike the church towers we are accustomed to seeing at home and was another of those things we hadn’t gone looking for but were very glad to find.
Söderköping also turned out to have a slightly surreal relationship with public art. Close to the canal we encountered a six-foot emperor penguin. I knew he was an emperor penguin because, obviously, he was wearing a crown. In the stream nearby, a shark’s fin appeared to be pursuing a group of swimmers, while from the bridge a cat clung precariously to a set of curtains. I have no idea what connected any of these things, but by this stage we had learned simply to accept what Sweden puts in front of us.
Before leaving we made one other important stop: Systembolaget, Sweden’s state-run alcohol shop. We needed a few supplies for our three nights in the apartment in Stockholm and emerged, amongst other things, with a Tetra Pak of Australian rosé wine.
Yes, a Tetra Pak.
Australian rosé.
We know how to travel in style.
Eventually, however, Stockholm was calling.The pretty roads gave way to faster ones and then to a long haul north on the motorway. We discovered another useful Swedish driving aid along the way: salt liquorice. It is difficult to know whether Swedish salt liquorice is a sweet, a savoury snack or some sort of national endurance test, but it proved surprisingly effective motorway fuel.
Then came Stockholm. There is always a slightly tense moment when several days of pottering happily along country roads and through small towns suddenly deposits you in a capital city. The roads became wider, the junctions more complicated, tunnels appeared and the satnav became increasingly insistent. Nevertheless, we successfully negotiated Stockholm’s road system without accidentally disappearing towards Finland and eventually arrived at our home for the next three nights.
We’re staying in Gärdet, just east of Östermalm, and it feels very different from the Stockholm of postcards and guidebooks. This is largely a twentieth-century neighbourhood, much of it developed from the 1930s onwards as Swedish functionalism took hold. Instead of dense traditional city blocks, apartment buildings were surrounded by trees and open space: the modernist ideal of houses set within a park.
Beyond them lies the enormous open expanse of Ladugårdsgärdet, once used as a military training ground and now part of Stockholm’s Royal National City Park. Djurgården lies beyond that, while the centre of Stockholm is only a few stops away on the Tunnelbana. So for the next three days we’re not quite living in tourist Stockholm. We’re living in the Stockholm where Stockholmers live.
For dinner we deliberately resisted the temptation to launch ourselves immediately at one of the city’s grander restaurants. We wanted straightforward Swedish food and found it at SV Gårdskök, a neighbourhood restaurant not far from us.We began with gravlax and then went for the chef’s selection of meatballs, with mashed potato, pickled cucumber and lingonberries. After several days in Sweden it felt almost negligent that we hadn’t yet had a proper plate of Swedish meatballs, so this was an omission that clearly needed correcting.
Our supposedly quiet neighbourhood dinner did, however, come with an unexpected soundtrack.Stockholm Stadium is just up the road and tomorrow night Veronica Maggio is playing a huge sold-out concert there. She is one of Sweden’s biggest pop stars, yet almost unknown in Britain, having built her career singing predominantly in Swedish rather than making the apparently obvious switch to English.
Tonight was soundcheck. A very loud soundcheck. So our first proper plate of Swedish meatballs was accompanied by one of Sweden’s biggest stars being tested at considerable volume a few hundred metres away. We may not previously have known much about Veronica Maggio, but by the end of dinner we certainly knew what she sounded like.
And that seems a rather good way to have arrived in Stockholm.
Today was less packed with sights than some of our previous days, but perhaps that was no bad thing. We said goodbye to Göran, wound our way through the Swedish countryside, ate quite ridiculous ice creams beside the Göta Canal, discovered a historic telephone box, watched a boat negotiate a lock, encountered a crowned penguin, a predatory shark and a curtain-climbing cat, bought Australian rosé in a cardboard box, fuelled ourselves with salt liquorice, survived Stockholm’s roads and ended with gravlax, meatballs and an involuntary introduction to Swedish pop music.
Tomorrow, we start exploring the capital properly.
